Never Tell. Claire Seeber

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СКАЧАТЬ no one else. Completely ignored, I felt adrift and friendless; overawed by the beauty of the city and the magnitude of history resting on its shoulders. Everywhere I walked were buildings so classical I’d seen them in books or on television; everywhere I wandered, the voices of students far more erudite than I echoed in my ears.

      Eventually, sick of my own company, and with the vague hope I could win kudos enough to hang out with the ‘journos’, I wrote a ridiculously pretentious piece for the student newspaper (cribbed largely from library textbooks) on the Romantic poets, their denial of organised religion and how they would have loved the speed and freedom of motorbikes. To my undying amazement, it was printed.

      On the Sunday evening, about to venture to the college bar for the first time, confident I finally had something to talk about of interest, I stacked my ten-pences up on the top of the payphone in my corridor and rang my parents to tell of my first success. My mother had just answered when I heard a snigger behind my back.

      ‘Shelley fucked Mary on a Yamaha, didn’t you know?’

      ‘Yeah, but Keats preferred Suzukis, I think you’ll find. La Belle Dame Sans Suzuki. Brilliant.’

      Mortified, I banged the phone down on my poor mother and hid in my room for a week.

      But boredom eventually got the better of me and I finally accepted an invitation from my sole acquaintance, a sulky girl called Moira, to go to the bar – where I drank two pints of snakebite ill-advisedly fast through sheer terror. Moira, who’d attached herself to me the previous week in the introductory lecture on Women’s literature of the nineteenth century, was for some reason deeply bitter already, and I was concentrating hard on blocking out both her drone and her rather pus-encrusted chin when a dark-haired boy, who looked like he might be about to introduce himself, tripped over a stool.

      ‘Watch out!’ I shrieked, ten seconds too late. He’d deposited his entire pint in my lap, the cold beer soaking straight through to my skin. ‘Oh God.’

      ‘Very sorry,’ he said, smiling broadly. ‘I’ll get you another one if you like.’

      ‘I don’t like, thanks very much,’ I huffed, standing up, my smock dress an unpleasant second skin. I had an odd feeling he’d done it deliberately. ‘I absolutely stink now. I’ll have to go and change.’

      ‘Oh, don’t do that,’ said the boy. ‘At least you’ll deter this lot.’ He nodded towards a group of apparently giant youths whose ears stuck out at funny angles and who had just begun a round of indecent rugby songs. One of them winked at me and immediately began to sing, ‘The girl with the biggest tits in the world is the only girl for me.’

      ‘I doubt it.’ I found I was emboldened by the alcohol. ‘The smell of beer’s probably a turn-on for them.’

      The dark-haired boy laughed. ‘You could be right there.’

      ‘I’ll come with you.’ Moira shot to her feet, clamping my arm between slightly desperate hands as if she sensed she was about to be usurped. ‘I need to start work on my Wollstonecraft essay anyway.’

      ‘Oh dear, do you?’ I looked at the boy’s grin and then at Moira’s yellow pimples. ‘Look, actually, you go on.’ I eased my arm gently from her hold. ‘I’ll have a gin and orange please,’ I said to the boy with a confidence I didn’t really feel. It was what my grandma drank; the first sophisticated drink that came to my slightly panicked mind. ‘As long as you promise to stay between me and him.’

      The rugby player’s ruddy face was gurning scarily at me as he invoked the delights of the arse of an angel. Moira stomped off muttering about beer and Wollstonecraft and ‘some people’.

      ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ I called after her, rather too quietly.

      The evening became a blur of alcohol and fags, and smoking a joint round the back of the bar, which was not as scary as I’d feared before my inaugural hesitant drag, though my head did spin a bit, and then going to someone’s room in Jesus College, where someone else suggested a drinking game and we shared what they called ‘a chillum’, and I felt very debauched and grownup until a plump girl called Liddy was sick in the bin, so we left. And frankly I was relieved, because my head was by now on the verge of spinning right off.

      ‘I’ll walk you back if you like,’ said the boy, who was called James and had nice smiley eyes and freckles. He said his dad had been a butcher and he was the first in his family to go to university, which bonded us because I was also the first in my immediate family, though actually my uncle – the white sheep of the Langtons – had attended this college and I wasn’t entirely sure that hadn’t helped me a bit to get my place. That, and the fact that during my interview the white-haired professor had sucked a stubby old cigar throughout, most of the time gazing at the velvet smoke whilst I’d banged on about William Faulkner and the great American novel for fifteen painful minutes. Finally, as bored of the subject as the be-suited professor obviously was, I’d asked what brand he was smoking as my father imported cigars from Cuba to his little shop in Derby and loved a Monte Cristo himself. After a discussion about the hotspots of Havana, where I managed to drop in mentions of both Hemingway and Graham Greene, as well as the delights of a daiquiri, the enchanted professor was happy to recommend I got an unconditional place.

      On the way back to my room James and I passed a polished Ducati parked between two obviously student cars, one of them an Escort leaning dangerously towards the pavement. Drunkenly I admired the bike; my big brother rode one and there was nothing I loved more than getting a lift on the back – though my mother always went mad when I did.

      James looked at me strangely as I kneeled down by the bike (wondering, actually, whether I could ever stand again). ‘You’re the girl who wrote that article in the Cherwell, aren’t you?’

      ‘My fame precedes me,’ I agreed, too drunk to be embarrassed. The fresh air was doing nothing for my level of intoxication. ‘I thought it was quite good when I wrote it, but everyone else thought it was terrible. It was terrible wasn’t it?’

      ‘Do you know Society X?’ James said quietly. I could have sworn he checked behind him before he did so, but I was having some trouble focusing at all by now, so perhaps I’d imagined it.

      ‘Nope,’ I shook my head. ‘Never heard of Society X.’ I’d just attended the Freshers’ Fair because frankly I’d had nothing else to do. I’d signed up to do Martial Arts because I quite fancied Bruce Lee and the idea of felling a villain with the single chop of a swift hand, and the Poetry Society because occasionally I wrote a few fairly dreadful stanzas myself, mainly about my dreams – but to be honest I found large groups of people rather shy-making. So instead I made a bad joke about X-rated films but James didn’t laugh; he just looked at me strangely again before depositing me at the porters’ lodge without so much as trying to kiss me. I was a bit surprised but actually relieved because that week I was still in love with a boy called Ralph whom I’d met in the summer holidays and who had promised to call me a fortnight ago. I was still waiting.

      And to be honest I forgot all about James and Society X until I met Dalziel, the aristocratic Honourable who spoke like he’d stepped from the pages of Waugh but partied like a rock star in the making.

      UNIVERSITY, OCTOBER 1991

      The heavenly Jerusalem.

      Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy

      A week or so later Moira and I bumped into James on the Bridge after a tutorial, battered old guitar СКАЧАТЬ